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"Oh no it's bad that people defederate servers"

No it's bad that people who don't understand running communities keep trying to run communities and need to be defederated

Aurynn Shaw

This post brought to you by me rolling my eyes super hard at the "oh no defederation is bad for the fediverse" bad takes showing up again

All of these “defederation is bad” takes are, in essence, saying that instance administrators exist to be vanity domain names and that a single contiguous fediverse is both possible and desired.

I reject both of these premises. Defederate early, defederate often, build the anarchic consensus you want to see.

@aurynn it's an act of moderation, and like all such acts, should be performed thoughtfully.

@aurynn constantly seeing news of instances defederating other instances where plenty of users have done nothing wrong frankly is the main thing stopping me using mastodon more. The idea that regular users can no longer properly connect with each other because they happened to choose an instance without knowing the ins and outs of the ecosystem, or even because of some admin drama or disagreement, is utterly horrible to me.

@aurynn I get that moderation is necessary. But from the perspective of a user who just wants to connect with people, coming from something like the bird site, the way the fediverse works currently seems fundamentally inherently broken. I have no idea if there is a solution, but I don't like how it is now

@lxcn I think the core disconnect is that Twitter fostered a belief that there can be a single objective timeline/social network, and fedi does not, and those are going to be irreconcilable

@aurynn Sure. But I don't want my subjective timeline to be decided by other people based on decisions or happenings I don't have the time or energy to understand or even be aware of. "defederate often" just says to me that in the fediverse, getting rid of nazis also means a lot of collateral damage and we just gotta accept it. And if that's how it's gotta be, maybe this isn't for me

@aurynn Some of the reasons I've seen for defederating instances are such hot garbage and nothing more than leftist infighting

@lxcn Yep, that's the way it is sometimes. Admins have, and will use, the power to sever links, and I think that's a good thing to deploy regularly.

@lxcn That's understandable, and I'm sorry it has to be that way

@lxcn @aurynn keep in mind that accounts can be imported to new instances. your friends are able to move if their admins and mods aren't behaving well enough to federate with the rest of your community.

i know it isnt easy and sometimes they wont do that. it sucks

but i dont get harassed chased or bullied consistently here, and the entire reason for it is good moderation and instance blocking tools on the user level. it felt like a super worthwhile tradeoff to me. but i understand if you dont feel the same.

@briellebouquet @aurynn but it's not always a case of the mods not behaving well. I saw a call for another instance I'm on to be defederated because people thought the admin team wasn't diverse enough by the standards of someone on the other side of the planet and there was a misunderstanding about what their policies were

like that's.. terrifying

@lxcn @briellebouquet There are feedback loops for engaged admins to check on that stuff before they make decisions, it's very much not a "you will get defederated on a whim". Fediblock posts aren't taken as gospel by, well, anyone.

@lxcn @aurynn that's frustrating. but im not sure what a person would do to fix that. im willing to accept the risk of having to track down friends after a mod squabble or jump instances at worst, bc i think it's important to continue preventing people from being abused or harassed.

im not arguing to block for silly or frivolous reasons. admins have a responsibility to their people. but ive only encountered that a couple of times. i find being on a small, chill server helps alot.

the biggest drag with instance blocking imo is that jumping instances is still flawed. if it weren't, people would have full, easy access to bouncing if their instance has an overzealous modding profile

@briellebouquet @lxcn @aurynn I think the problem is that this is one of those topics that can't be clearly defined as good or bad - it's both.

It's good that I don't have to federate with abusive assholes who try to spread hate on my timeline.

It's bad when my admin decides to defederate me from people I am friends with or get defederated "because you're running misskey/pleroma" or some other negligible non-indicator.

Like any tool you can get good or bad results and it depends on the person operating it.

For my part I solved the problem of admins deciding for me by moving to a single user instance - at the cost of having to do all the admin work myself... and getting defederated for being a single user instance :blobcatgooglyshrug:

Can't make everyone happy I guess!

Defederation discussion, admins

Admins are humans.
And power corrupts.
Admins are neither elected, nor are their decisions based on the desire/needs of the collective (yes, theoretically, there could be some weak feedback from the users).
But it is not transparent what internal discussion leads to the decision to defederate.
And as mod-team you might get carried away by outrage dynamics, having to take decisions quickly (after working the whole day and bringing your kids to bed).
And once the defederation is in place, it is very difficult to revoke it. The defederated instance is pissed, the communication gets difficult... depending on personal relationships, your decision might even convinces some other admins of the inner circle of the tier0 blocklist, and the block gets really, really wide.

Hell, as a user, you don't even notice a defederation, maybe just wonder why some peers are so silent lately (ok, depends on the communication of your admin team).

Clarification: many blocks make totally sense, and there are great differences among users regarding their need for protection. But the decision of defederation is not crystal clear, and even the admins would prefer to have something like 'lets defederate to a degree of 67%'. But this option is technically not there.

To be clear: I love my admin team (kolektiva.social happens to be an anarchist instance). And I respect the admins and mods out there: doing a lot of work for the community. Thanks.

But the defederation approach is very far away from being a structurally satisfying solution.

It's more like a 'feel free to choose the monarchy you want to live in'. 👑

@aurynn @lxcn

@lxcn @aurynn At least one oddity here: the big difference is that you don't *see* the collateral damage on a centralised platform (like Twitter) where they give no reasons and occasionally ban people for mentioning bans.

I promise you there's stupid reasons for bans. I've seen a not-small amount of it (you probably have too.) They intentionally play it down and make it harder to see.

It absolutely, no question, 100% happens. But the hot-garbage reasons are intentionally not told publicly.

@codefolio @aurynn I mean the reason I started being active here is Twitter being awful, so yeah, I'm not trying to defend that site. I also don't buy "but it's worse elsewhere" as a defence

@codefolio @aurynn as a casual user, the fediverse is bewildering and difficult to understand. And yeah the things I've read about and heard about from friends trying to maintain things just have left me with the impression that I'm liable to be unknowingly disconnected from random groups of people without being aware of it, which feels.. not great as a place to be

@lxcn @codefolio Random groups of people dropping off the network will happen as instances shut down - recent examples being mastodon.lol or mastodon.technology. Unfortunately.

@aurynn @codefolio yeah!

this is the kind of thing I mean by inherently broken as it is now

@lxcn @codefolio Bluesky has a different set of brokenness, but as far as I understand doesn't let anyone break social graphs

@lxcn @codefolio to be clear this isn't meant as anything but trying to help alleviate your anxiety around social graph breaking, definitely not a "you're not welcome here" sort of post

@aurynn @lxcn @codefolio i find Bluesky’s approach misguided. Yes, you ostensibly get to set your own rules, but the one enforcing those rules is a centralized mechanism that seems to be largely AI. (They’ll eventually have to hire human moderators, but that won’t make it any less centralized.)

Whereas Masto is more of a bunch of loosely-associated community islands which either have their bridges drawn or not, and you get to (relatively cheaply) move to the town next door if you prefer.

@lxcn @codefolio @aurynn Yeah, it feels like defed exists as an admin tool but the user-level tools to control their experience with that functionality in mind aren’t available. If users have the ability to know when they’ve lost a chunk of their network due to defed, easily ID which servers allow communication to which of their followers, and move seamlessly (no losing posts) to their preferred server? It all becomes less problematic, but it sounds like none of those are possible.

@Serenus @lxcn @codefolio

Letting local users know an admin has blocked another server is coming, but letting remote users know is attack surface that will be used by hostile instances.

Easy identification, a lot of instances hide blocklists now because it's attack surface from hostile instances.

Post migration is technically complicated and opens up a lot of liability concerns for admins being migrated to, but may happen one day.

@lxcn @aurynn Specifically:

> But I don't want my subjective timeline to be decided by other people based on decisions or happenings I don't have the time or energy to understand or even be aware of.

This is gonna happen on literally every platform.

@codefolio @aurynn if you take those literal words out of context, sure. I think it's pretty clear I was talking about something that's qualitatively different in the fediverse.

I'm aware that every platform has inherent thorny issues relating to moderation; I'm describing my observation and feeling since trying to get into things around here

@lxcn @aurynn there are two kinds of servers: the kind where everything is really big and the idea is you go in and read stuff from wherever and they try to only block if something really bad is happening

and the kind that's more like a community and the idea is you have to deal with as little harassment as is physically possible so you can have a nice safe experience talking with people you are at least vaguely acquainted with and trust

you're never gonna be able to get consistent access to all of the second kind of servers from anywhere and being on one does mean the mods will make a lot of active decisions, but you can find a middle ground between "insular community" and "mastodon.spambigots"

it sucks that it's hard to find an actual for real list of servers though because every so often one of those nice middle grounds' moderators flips their fucking shit and says something racist or whatever

meta

@lxcn @aurynn The hypothetical user you described doesn’t have to join the Fediverse if it isn’t what they want. Other alternatives with a different approach also exist.

@lxcn @aurynn when/if Meta ever creates a federated social network I can see many users moving there. Theoretically they could still connect with others in the fediverse without admins pulling the rug.

@aurynn I self host my own instance and even though it’s just me, following and applying some of the fediblocks has provided for a safe and cool space to hang out. So yes, defederation can be a very useful tool for shaping one’s experience regardless of scale.

@aurynn I feel we're seeing this amplified by the conflicting expectations coming from Website Boy's "Join Mastodon" marketing pitching it as, yeah, a big new, unified Twitter with vanity domain names and a bunch of us who've been here for years enjoying how we are ABLE to federate our small communities together with other like-minded ones if we want to.

They're selling people a product that doesn't exist.

@mike oh that’s a really interesting point.

@aurynn @mike I think these problems with defederation and misbehaving admins would be much less severe if there weren't large instances that have users who don't even know who their mods/admins are. The "99% of users on that.domain are totally innocent" objection to defederation wouldn't apply if the instance were small enough for nearly everyone to have had some direct interaction with their admin at some point. There'd both be fewer innocent people to affect, and they'd be more likely to have actually noticed the behavior themselves and had a chance to make a choice in how to deal with it.

@mike @aurynn Witness the first versions of his app entirely lacking the Local and Federated timelines - that remains, as far as I can tell, where he's at: that local atmosphere is an aberration, doubly so for the Federated timeline, which from his perspective serves no function, yet on every other instance, is a neat place to dip into, occasionally answering queries raised or boosting something you wouldn't have otherwise encountered.

@porsupah @mike it took me hours of arguing with him on Discord to even get Local in the official app. He’s very much in the “if it’s not useful for my abnormally large instance it’s not useful at all” camp, frustratingly.

@aurynn @porsupah this was the final straw for me:
github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i

It's his whole "I don't care what works for you, you're getting what I want for my huge instance" attitude in a nutshell right there.

It could have been an option, surely.

GitHubRegression in 3.4: Default follows for new users · Issue #16229 · mastodon/mastodonBy joenepraat

@aurynn If federation is a core feature of the protocol, so is the inverse.

@aurynn Straight up? No.

This is literally admins choosing to end relationships for their users, often with no accountability. If there's actual accountability? then maybe. But there so rarely is.

But not all defederations are the same.

nazis? Bye.
fascists? Bye.
trolling instances? Bye.
mastodon.social? DEAL WITH THE POWER RELATION AND HAVE THE HARD CONVERSATIONS PLEASE. Taking it as defed-or-not is not actually a great starting point for those conversations.
instance whose admin was on vacation for a day and didn't respond fast enough to banning one user who is kinda questionably nasty? Nah. Limit, have conversations, try to build a consensus.

Having to migrate to another server because of spats between admins about people you don't know? That is in fact harmful.

These are our social relationships involved. Damage to them requires accountability for the harm caused.

@aredridel This is what you pay your admin to do.

@aurynn ehhhhh. That doesn’t mean they’ll be appropriately responsible, nor structure those decisions well. It might be a ticket to the negotiation but that’s not really the power relation most admins have with their users.

@aredridel to me, admins are responsible to their users and to other admins. There's a burden of responsibility to comport yourself well to other admins to not get yourself defederated. That is the emergent consensus system at play.

@aurynn yeah I have not yet seen it in any instance I’d want to be on. I have however been subject to an admin spat twice. Both I was told to go duck myself when I complained. And notably not my admins, so while I have a stake in the outcome, no stake in the decision.

@aredridel Federation is a privilege, not a right, and any instance has can defed for any reason they see fit, including reasons you disagree with.

@aurynn why is this a good plan? This damages relationships.

@aurynn actually I find this framing offensive while I guess technically correct. It completely ignores the power dynamics involved.

@aredridel You are not entitled to a contiguous fediverse, and neither I nor anyone else are required to provide it to you. My admin duties require me to keep my users safe, not prioritise your social connections.

@aurynn safe from what? Our social bonds are our safety. Why is the network for if not connecting?

@aredridel Safe from harassment. Safe from admins who won't action usefully reports against people on their instances.

It's not a useful social system if you're afraid to use it because people can harass you.

@aurynn it’s also not a useful social system if people go silent because of third parties with no accountability. I would honestly rather be harassed. I can block that shit. It’s the power dynamics not getting acknowledged that does real harm.